The Shortcomings of Human Love
Without a perfect human love, perfect joy remains out of reach.
Prefatory Note: In a previous post, I announced that I was beginning a year-long effort to articulate the gospel according to Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. This is the fourth installment in that series.
I was scooping up my children because I thought the graveside service was over. And it was over, till my cousin marched to the casket with a boombox. I didn’t know such an antique still existed — the battery-operated, CD-playing machine. Yet hear it was.
Apparently my grandmother had requested that “their song” be played before she was buried. “Their song,” the song that had accompanied them for 67 years of marriage, was Johnny Mathis’ “The Twelfth of Never.” My aunt made this announcement and everyone stopped to listen to the song. Somehow, in all of this, I ended up right next to the casket. There, I read my grandfather’s tombstone (he had already been dead for five years) and I could peer down the shaft next to my grandmother’s casket and stare into the pitch blackness of her tomb.
“Until the twelfth of never, I’ll still be loving you…” Johnny’s voice sang out. It was a cry for some sort of eternal love, a never ending love. And this cry captured the longing of the hearts of my grandparents. Yet here I was staring at a tombstone and at the terrible finality of death. Apparently, Johnny’s was a false promise.
The words from Song of Songs went through my head: “For Love is strong as Death, longing is fierce as Sheol” (8:6). Strong as death, but not stronger than death.
“Hold me close. Never let me go,” Johnny’s voice rang out.
I felt almost like I was being torn in half. Looking into my grandmother’s grave, I saw and heard the disparity between human longing and the dead end of death. I could feel it. It was anguish, in its purest form. The human heart longs for a love that is stronger than death, one that can conquer the loneliness of Sheol. Then, something snapped inside of me. In complete silence, I screamed. Confronted with the harshness of human love’s insufficiency before the power of death, let out a deep plea in the silence of my heart.
Nobody There
A few years before my grandmother passed, my grandfather was lying in a hospital in Toledo, Ohio. He had had a surgery and the recovery faltered. As time wore on, the WWII veteran who paratrooped into Normandy days after D-Day, the man who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the manual laborer who assembled GE motors, the husband of 67 years, the father of five children, this man was losing hope. Embittered and tired, and probably scared, he knew the end was in sight. His life, filled with so much quiet suffering, likely stemming from his experience in the war, was ending in more suffering.
On April 20, 2014, Easter Sunday, my parents visited him in the hospital. My mom recounts the story:
When we went to leave, he asked "So, who will be here with me in the morning?" I told him that the nurses are always there, and that Jill [his daughter, my aunt] and Grandma would probably be there like they always did in the late morning or early afternoon. He repeated again, "No, but who will be here with me in the morning?" I repeated all of what I’d just said back to him, and he looked at me so intently and said, "I'll call out each one of your names and nobody will be here with me.” I assured him that the nurses are always there with and for him, and he just said again, "Nobody will be here with me."
He died the next morning, April 21. None of us were there with him.
Longing
Both of these stories reveal something of the human heart. I would wager a bet it’s something common amongst all human beings who aren’t in a state of despair. It’s one of these ubiquitous human realities, not unlike birth and death.
Birth and death are interesting to think about, even for a moment. Each of us was born. We were given. Not a single one of us is a truly self-creating reality. We depended on another, on others, for life, and, in fact, we still depend on others for so many things in our lives. Birth signifies givenness and dependence. It signifies humility. And death. Death confronts us all. Save for Jesus, the human death rate is 100%. It stands before us as the fear above and below all our other fears. I’m currently reading Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. Early in the novel, the main character, Hazel Motes, recounts numerous experiences of seeing bodies in caskets, as he lay, rocking, in his train car bed that made him feel he was lying in his own coffin. Since reading this, I’ve thought of so many funerals I’ve attended. I pass by people on the road or in the grocery store and think about the fact that this person, too, will die and will be lying in a grave someday. I will, too. And this is something odd, something morbid, we have in common — a kind of common end, each of us laying in a tomb, stiff and still.
Birth and death and longing for love, for communion — for a loving communion powerful enough to conquer the grave — these human realities, I argue, form a kind of backdrop for every human life. And that longing for human love to be present when it matters most, that’s what my grandparents wanted. Yet it seems the twelfth of never did come and pass. It passed after 67 years, leaving black nothingness in its wake. It seems nobody is there as one “crosses the bar,” as Tennyson describes death.
Intensity
The harsh contours of death bring the intensity of the longing for love into striking relief. It does the same for the shortcomings of human love. Death wins. And it sure seems that way when it slinks into a hospital room and snatches away a lonely old man, or laughs in the face of Johnny Mathis’ promise of unending love. Still we long for an eternal love. We long for a connection powerful enough to defeat death. Our hearts ache for it.
Besides its finite nature, human love manifests plenty of other shortcomings, too. For example, it often admits of use. Beyond the times we find ourselves objectified by others — used and discarded in our throwaway culture — there’s a terrible admixture of motives in the fallen human heart. It is a mixture of gift and use. Ratzinger puts it this way: “Who among us can say that he truly, in all simplicity, carries out the service of being kind to others? Who among us would not have to admit that even in the acts of kindness he practices toward others, there is still an element of selfishness, something of self-satisfaction and looking back at ourselves?”
Beyond use, love is inconsistent. A person seems to love me in one moment (e.g., is patient with me), and not in the next (e.g., loses patience). So often, conditional love (i.e., “I’ll love you if…”) is the norm. Plus, all human love bears within it a certain ignorance. The depths of the human heart remain impenetrable, so all love carries within it a degree of uncertainty.
Despite such shortcomings, we long for a love that is pure gift, that does not admit of use. We long for consistent love and true love (i.e., a love that knows me to the bottom of my existence and accepts me still). We long for unconditional love. And above all, we long for love of an infinite variety — the kind that can satiate the infinite longings of the heart and burst the bonds of death.
Without such love, we can never be (perfectly) joyful. You might recall from the previous post, that joy is the peace or harmony I experience within myself when I accept myself. The problem is, I cannot accept myself, I cannot love myself (perfectly) for so many reasons. I must be loved by another. Yet the other’s love falls short. We need to be loved (perfectly) to be (perfectly) joyful, yet none of us are loved perfectly. And, when we need it most, when we pass through the doorway of death, it seems nobody is there. And that, is hell.